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THE MUSE IN EXILE 



THE 
MUSE IN EXILE 

POEMS BY 
WILLIAM 
WATSOIS^ 

TO WHICH IS ADDED AN ADDRESS ON 

THE POET'S PLACE IN 
THE SCHEME OF LIFE 




NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

1913 



Copyright, 1913, by William Watson 
All Rights Reserved 






J. J. LITTLE & IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK, U. S. A. 



©CI.A843855 



TO 

ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON 
OF NEW YORK 

In your swift city, where all things 

Hasten on such impetuous wings, 

Nought have I known to fly more fast 

Than hours that 'neath your roof were passed. 

To you these pages ! and may they 

Hurry not utterly away. 

W. W. 



PREFACE 

THE greater number of the poems and 
verses in this volume now make their first 
appearance; others are recovered from 
the pages of the Times, the Daily News, 
the Daily Chronicle, the Nation, the Spectator, the 
New York Times, the Irish Times, the Cornhill 
Magazine, and the Quest; and I am indebted to the 
editors of these journals and periodicals for liberty 
to reprint my contributions. The " Hymn for a 
Progressive People " has appeared, without that 
title, in the new hymnals of the Unitarian and 
Congregational churches in America, but has not 
hitherto been published in England. 

Concerning one short poem — the lines entitled 
" Science and Nature " — I wish here to say a few 
words. On its appearance in a newspaper this little 
piece evoked rejoinders, couched in vivacious verse, 
from two writers perhaps more truly distinguished 
by their prose — Mr. Eden Phillpotts and Mr. 
Chiozza Money. Neither of these gentlemen re- 



8 PREFACE 

sorted to any un fairer weapon than the retort 
courteous, but both of them seemed to suppose that 
the object of their very urbane attack was a person 
either uninterested in science, or hostile to it; and 
I had fondly imagined that there was quite enough 
in the fourteen or fifteen volumes, with which I 
have helped to encumber the shelves of the British 
Museum and the Bodleian, to make such a supposi- 
tion impossible. It so happens that I was almost 
cradled in ideas of Evolution, and grew up in an 
atmosphere where ** natural selection " and " the 
survival of the fittest " were household words. My 
earliest companion in country walks — my father — 
was a man whose very enfranchised mind had a 
natural impulse towards scientific speculation on its 
largest lines, and he did not long leave me unim- 
bued with his own tendencies. One of the last let- 
ters written by Darwin — a letter making beautifully 
courteous acknowledgment of the utility of a trifling 
suggestion sent to him — was written to me, then a 
very young man, the author of a single unnoticed 
book. It was written on April i8, 1882, the day 
before he died, and was published by me soon after- 
wards in the Academy, where it can be found by the 
curious. I have been told on good authority that 
the friendly interest which Herbert Spencer is 



PREFACE 9 

known to have taken in my writings was partly due 
to his perceiving with pleasure that their author was 
in touch with the modern spirit, which to him meant 
the scientific spirit. Passing from these personal 
reminiscences I return to what occasioned them — 
the lines entitled " Science and Nature." These 
verses of mine had especial reference to " aviation," 
and I still think, as I thought when I wrote them, 
that to do imperfectly and with difficulty what any 
seabird can do with divinely beautiful ease, and 
then to call this awkward imitation the " conquest 
of the air," is to court criticism and to use vain- 
glorious language. As a matter of fact, whilst I 
watch all the really great achievements of the scien- 
tific intelligence with as fascinated a gaze as in early 
youth, I cannot but think that there is as good 
reason now as there was then for some protest 
against what used to be called, not entirely without 
justification, the arrogance of science. When one 
considers, for instance, that the operations of elec- 
trical energy have been, as one may say, flashed 
and brandished before Man s eyes ever since he 
was Man, the fact that he has very recently come 
to know anything about them should rather be an 
occasion for humility than for pride. When one 
remembers at how late a period in the history of 



10 PREFACE 

knowledge was discovered either the circulation of 
our own dwelling-place around the sun, or the cir- 
culation of the blood in our own bodies; when, 
looking at the progress of applied science, we con- 
sider how long Nature had been vainly thrusting 
upon our attention the unused capabilities of steam 
as a motive power; one may, perhaps, be pardoned 
for asking of the scientific intellect some modera- 
tion in the homage it pays to its own subtlety. A 
hundred other instances might be cited to the same 
effect, but perhaps the point hardly needs to be 
laboured. 

Together with the verse-contents of this volume 
I have included a lecture given last winter before 
various audiences in America. Prepared with en- 
forced haste, on shipboard, it has defects of which 
I am extremely sensible, and no doubt it has many 
others besides; but when I sat down to revise and 
generally castigate it into some sort of fitness for 
its present form of publication I found that it would 
speedily become, under that process, a palimpsest in 
which the old matter would tend to disappear al- 
together under the new; so I decided to let it go 
forth untouched, with all its blemishes, more espe- 
cially as it does say with sincerity, if also with the 
disjointedness which is perhaps permissible in an 



PREFACE II 

oral address, some things of which I wished to de- 
liver my mind. Certain very good-natured critics 
in America interpreted part of it as a lament for 
the insufficient praise bestowed upon living poets, 
and took me gently to task on that score ; but what 
I had rather meant to convey was a feeling of dis- 
satisfaction at the paucity of real discussion, 
whether it involve praise or blame: direct discus- 
sion of concrete qualities in a poet's work. Twenty 
or thirty years ago we were threatened with a sur- 
feit of a kind of criticism which made rather ex- 
aggerated claims to be synthetic, and which took 
the form of ponderous essays with some such titles 
as " Keats and the French Revolution," or " Shelley 
and the Precession of the Equinoxes." This kind 
of criticism has latterly abated, and though I do not 
much bewail the fact I could wish that the so-called 
" synthesis " had been replaced by rather more of 
definite analysis than I can see in the criticism o£ 
the present day. For a quarter of a century before 
the death of Swinburne it became the custom to 
place that poet on an elevation where critical tests 
and standards were simply suspended altogether. It 
is these tests and standards that I wish to see more 
rigorously enforced, and applied to the living and 
the dead alike. I ask for more discussion of the 



12 PREFACE 

actual ways and means by which a poet compasses, 
or fails to compass, his specifically poetic ends; 
more examination of his art and science as a poet. 
To illustrate what appears to me the regrettable 
dearth of such discussion and examination, I will 
risk being thought a prattling egotist, and will tell 
a little story drawn from my own experience. A 
few years ago I resolved to deepen somewhat my 
too superficial knowledge of old English history by 
going to the original sources from which our mod- 
ern historians derive their material. Accordingly, 
I spent no inconsiderable time in reading very thor- 
oughly the old chroniclers of this island's fortunes, 
from Gildas and Bede and Nennius down to Flor- 
ence of Worcester and other twelfth-century an- 
nalists, and I was greatly struck by the unexpected 
frequency with which superbly picturesque phrases 
leap from their rust-eaten pens. Where, I asked 
myself, in Freeman or Green, could one meet with 
diction so vivid as in the passage where one of 
these ancients, describing the mustering of an army, 
speaks of the rustle of their breastplates f' Where 
could one find a modern counterpart to the phraseol- 
ogy of another old chronicler who pictures a mili- 
tary conqueror as filling his wheel-tracks with 
hlood? I, therefore, tried an experiment. Writing 



PREFACE 13 

a poem, which I afterwards published — first with 
the title of The King Without Peer, subsequently as 
King Alfred — I introduced into its opening lines a 
striking expression directly borrowed from a sen- 
tence of Asser's in which he speaks of Alfred's 
physical infirmities : Erat itaque rex ille multis 
tribulationum clavis confossus. And reproducing 
the latter part of this sentence almost literally as 
'* pierced with many nails of pain " — a. haunting 
phrase which perhaps the author of the Book of 
Job would not have disdained — I then, throughout 
the rest of my poem, imported bodily many other 
powerful phrases from the archaic poems quoted in 
the Saxon Chronicle; from that Chronicle itself; 
from William of Malmesbury and Henry of Hunt- 
ingdon; from that glorious romanticist, Geoffrey 
of Monmouth, and from kindred sources; weaving 
these phrases into my verse with such poor skill as 
I could command. One of them was possibly the 
original of a more famous but not finer phrase of 
Milton's. And as these jewels were not of my own 
fashioning, I feel free to say that they were mag- 
nificent; but I suppose they were taken to be my 
own, and, at any rate, they passed without a word 
of comment, so far as I know, save in one provin- 
cial newspaper. I narrate my little experiment and 



14 PREFACE 

its result, because I think the matter gives some 
point to my complaint that criticism is falling into 
a habit of passing neglectfully over what I will call 
the literary aspects of literature — surely not its least 
interesting aspects. I have, however, touched here 
the outskirts of a large subject to which I hope to 
return before this young year grows old. 

W. W. 



{ 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Dedication — To Robert Underwood Johnson . . 5 

Preface 7 

The Poet's Place in the Scheme of Life ... 17 

The Muse in Exile 39 

Dawn on the Headland 42 

To a Privileged Thief 44 

The Centenary of Dickens 46 

The Three Givers 50 

Imperial Mother - . -Si 

Home Truths 52 

Liberalism . . - ^Z 

On Pyrrho, a Great Editor 54 

A Guess in Anthropology 55 

A Literary Dialogue 58 

Summer's Overthrow 62 

Dublin Bay 64 

Hymn for a Progressive People 66 

Ireland Once More 68 

On Killiney Strand 70 

Part of my Story 71 

The Sappers and Miners T^ 

A Full Confession 'j^ 

A Little Ditty 79 

15 



i6 CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Indestructibles 8i 

Peace . , ... 82 

A Retort . . 83 

Clontarf .V 84 

"Ireland's Eye'' . .85 

Moonset and Sunrise 87 

Science and Nature . .^ 94 

A Chance Meeting . ., 95 

To A Certain Ministry 96 

The Rash Poet 97 

Arthur at Tintagil: A Romaunt .... 98 

Ulster's Reward 100 

SONNETS 

To Theodore Roosevelt 105 

Till That Hour ........ 107 

To an American Poet 109 

To AN English Liberal 11 1 

To Miss Clara B. Spence 113 

The Real Reformer 115 



THE POET'S PLACE IN 
THE SCHEME OF LIFE 

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN VARIOUS PARTS 
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

IN the latter part of the reign of Queen Victoria, 
at Ambleside, in the County of Westmoreland, 
and the country of Wordsworth, a coach- 
driver was taking a party of excursionists 
through one of the most charming pieces of scenery 
in that heavenly neighbourhood. He was taking 
them along Loughrigg Drive, and on passing the 
house associated with that eminent historian, Dr. 
Arnold of Rugby, he pointed it out to his passengers 
with this illuminating remark : ** That was the resi- 
dence of the late Dr. Arnold — Dr. Matthew Ar- 
nold, the Queen's head physician." Now that coach- 
man was, as I happen to know, a most excellent 
man, a man whom the contemporaries of Shake- 
speare would, I suppose, have called " excellent in 
the quality he professes." His manner of driving 
combined an appearance of recklessness with an 

17 



i8 THE POET'S PLACE 

actually high degree of circumspection in a way 
which gave his passengers at once an exhilarating 
sense of adventure and a comforting assurance of 
security. But I must qualify this tribute to his 
genius for " the manage of horses," in general, by 
the admission that he had little familiarity with the 
special points of that rather restive steed, Pegasus. 
In other words, he was, I am afraid, typical of those 
innumerable persons, in whose scheme of life the 
poet cannot properly be said to have a place at all. 
I say those innumerable persons, and, as a matter 
of fact, in my own country they form a majority 
so overwhelming that the minority sinks into an 
almost negligible, almost invisible fraction of the 
people as a whole. In America, I have reason to 
think that the case is different. The number of 
persons in this country who take an interest in 
poets, — it may not always be an effusively benevo- 
lent interest, — is manifestly far larger in proportion 
to the entire population than in the country of 
Chaucer and Milton. But even here I suspect that 
an increasingly substantial body of persons are ac- 
quiescing in a scheme of life which excludes poetry 
altogether — a scheme of life in which the poet has 
no place at all. This is a state of things obviously 
unfortunate for the poet, and I for one hold the 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 19 

Opinion that it is not altogether good for his fellow- 
men. You are, of course, at liberty to form your 
own judgment as to the disinterestedness of this 
opinion, but you will hardly deny that the state of 
things I have spoken of is really a phenomenon of 
our times, and, as such, deserves attention and 
study. What is the true explanation of it? 

We live, one man will tell us, in a busy age, and 
the world has simply no time for poetry, no leisure 
for the muse. Another will assure us that poetry 
is bound to recede and dwindle before her great 
competitor and supplanter, science. The external 
and physical world is declared to be more marvel- 
lous than any inner world of the mind, and imag- 
ination must be relegated to a comparatively humble 
place as a vassal kingdom under the suzerainty of 
knowledge. To both of these contentions I vehe- 
mently demur. 

In the first place I have a strong suspicion that 
what is called the speed and rush of modern life as 
compared with the supposed tranquillity and delib- 
erateness of the past is largely an illusion, and at 
any rate the slowness and tedium of our age is 
clearly what most often oppresses the ordinary man. 
The motor-car and the aeroplane are typical of a 
hundred ways by which he desperately seeks to 



20 THE POET'S PLACE 

escape from the monotony, the slowness, of a life 
empty of action and incident ; a life in which noth- 
ing occurs; a life made so smooth and orderly by 
the operation of law and custom — a life so regu- 
lated and policed— that none of the primal passions 
have free play in it, that the elements of sudden 
danger and thrilling hazard are almost banished 
from it, and the exercise of some of the more heroic 
virtues almost precluded. One might have thought 
that a life so shorn of its more glowing colours, its 
more violent situations, would provide precisely the 
antecedent conditions necessary for the appreciation 
of an art whose function is to see the world through 
a kind of ecstasy; to heighten and emphasize its 
lineaments, though without distorting them; to see 
vividly, to paint nobly, and to feel romantically, 
whatever in this universe is to be seen and felt and 
painted. Yet the truth must be confessed that the 
art whose functions I venture thus to describe — the 
art of poetry — is, more than all others, the art 
which of late has appealed with constantly diminish- 
ing force to the audience which it addresses. 

In the second place, — coming to the statement, so 
often made, that poetry is being ousted by science, 
let me say at once that between poetry and science 
I can perceive no antagonism whatever. I do not 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 21 

believe it possible for any true poetic greatness to 
coexist with an attitude of hostility towards the 
advancement of knowledge. If I heard of a poet 
who, whether under theological or other influences, 
cut himself off from the great avenues of enlighten- 
ment, — who, for instance, allowed himself to live in 
ignorance of the results of modern biological re- 
search as they affect the supremely interesting ques- 
tion of man's origin on this planet, — I should say — 
" this is a poet insufficiently interested in man and 
in life " ; and I do not believe that such a poet 
could have anything really pertinent to say to his 
generation. The poet who is really a poet, however 
deeply he may strike root in the past, emphatically 
lives and moves and has his being in the present. 
There is nothing of the mustiness of antiquity about 
him. And the necessity for him is never so great 
as in an age exceptionally fruitful of scientific dis- 
covery. For the more we know of the plan and 
workings of this cosmos, especially in its astronom- 
ical relations, the more does it wear the appearance 
of a scrupulously and soullessly accurate machine; 
the more does it seem a merely ingenious contriv- 
ance, a magnification, on an infinite scale, of a de- 
sign not inconceivably beyond the powers of some 
prodigious human engineer; the more does it seem 



22 THE POETS PLACE 

a piece of illimitable, fantastic clockwork, rather 
terrifying in its adamantine regularity; and the 
greater becomes our need of that particular order 
of mind which never quite loses its consciousness 
of the soul behind the apparently mechanical 
springs; which cares about the springs, mainly in 
so far as they seem to give evidence of a soul; and 
which translates into rhythm and melody the iron 
routine of the universe. 

Yet I am bound to admit that this need for the 
poet is felt by but few persons in our day. With 
one exception there is not a living English poet, the 
sales of whose poems would not have been thought 
contemptible by Scott and Byron. The exception 
is, of course, that apostle of British imperialism — 
that vehement and voluble glorifier of Britannic 
ideals, whom I dare say you will readily identify 
from my brief, and, I hope, not disparaging descrip- 
tion of him. With that one brilliant and salient 
exception, England's living singers succeed in reach- 
ing only a pitifully small audience. The fault, many 
persons hold, is in the poets themselves. For my 
part, I will not say that I share that view. Neither 
will I say that I totally dissent from it. But I will 
say this — the indifference of the reading public to 
contemporary poetry is, in my belief, largely due to 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 23 

the vagaries and perversities of a kind of critic who 
is not so much an expositor and interpreter of liter- 
ature as a rather officious interloper between writers 
and readers. Lest, however, I should be misunder- 
stood, and should be wrongly supposed to depre- 
ciate, not only the noble science of criticism itself, 
but that company of select minds by whom its best 
traditions are honourably upheld in our own day, 
let me hasten to explain my meaning with some 
approach to fullness. 

We have amongst us the critic with a bee in his 
bonnet ; the critic who finds that it pays him to have 
a bee in his bonnet, since brilliantly unsound criti- 
cism is often more readable than criticism which is 
unbrilliantly sound; the critic who makes little at- 
tempt to arrive at fundamental laws of taste and of 
art, but who has infinite confidence in his own 
crotchets, who gives a loose rein to his idiosyncrasy, 
or, shall I say, erects his idiosyncrasy into a stand- 
ard or criterion; the critic who happens to have a 
temperamental preference for a certain kind or 
order of excellence, perhaps not the highest kind or 
order, and who judges everything that comes before 
him with sole reference to the degree in which it 
satisfies that particular idiosyncratic test of his. 
Then there is the critic who sets an inordinate value 



24 THE POET'S PLACE 

on a certain kind of simplicity, — a simplicity often 
as self-conscious and deliberate as the most highly 
elaborated ornateness ; in fact, a simplicity which is 
one of the most artificial products of extreme liter- 
ary sophistication. This kind of critic is offended 
by any richness or splendour of attire in which 
the poet has — perhaps appropriately — clothed his 
thought. We have, too, the critic who at every 
opportunity, in or out of season, pits one great 
writer against another, instead of appreciating the 
individuality of both; who plays off Wordsworth 
against Shelley, or Shelley against Wordsworth, in- 
stead of recognizing that the poetry of Wordsworth 
is a food, while the poetry of Shelley is a stimulant 
— that food is a more essential and indispensable 
thing than stimulants, while nevertheless stimulants, 
though not things one can live upon, have at times 
their value, and, in short, that the poet who feeds 
and nourishes us, and the poet who fires and quick- 
ens us, are alike performing, each in his own way, a 
noble service. There is likewise the critic — and he 
has been very much to the fore of late — who frank- 
ly dislikes and resents sound and solid workman- 
ship; who thinks it one of the signs of genius to be 
careless of finish and scornful of technique; who 
fails to comprehend that real inspiration can work 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 25 

hand in hand with careful craftsmanship, not ex- 
tinguished or hampered by it, but informing and 
ennobHng what would otherwise be scarcely better 
than dull mechanic toil. And finally there is the 
critic who is eternally demanding that poetry should 
be progressive, and to whom progress means a kick- 
ing against tradition and a violent breach with the 
past. He does not recognize that there are limits 
beyond which the only possible progress is a descent 
into mere eccentricity and formlessness. Some 
critics when they speak of progress really mean de- 
composition. In art, as in nature, there is such a 
thing as ripeness, and we all know what is the stage 
that succeeds to it. 

Now I maintain that the total effect produced 
upon the " reading public " by this orgy of critical 
individualism is a distracting and bewildering one, 
and that it makes seriously against the appreciation 
of what is good in contemporary poetry. People 
read, let us say, in their favourite newspaper, a 
highly laudatory review of some work really pro- 
duced in response to a purely factitious demand 
created by a literary " group," by a critical cabal, 
whose habit it is to set an exaggerated value on 
certain literary qualities. The " public " buy some 
copies of this work, find in it no refreshment for 



26 THE POET'S PLACE 

their soul, nothing but what is odd or quaint or 
deHberately singular and freakish, and they come to 
the conclusion that the latter-day poet is a being 
who dwells apart from life as to all its larger man- 
ifestations, a person uninterested in politics, in 
science, in sociology, in the progress of the human 
species; a dreamy, ineffectual, and generally neu- 
rotic creature, concerned chiefly with the manufac- 
ture of strange epitaphs and the analysis of his own 
equally strange and not very important emotions. 
Is it surprising if they imagine that contemporary 
poetry has nothing to give them which can in any 
way illustrate or clarify life — nothing which in any 
way says to them an intimate and helpful word? 

For amid many doubtful and arguable matters, 
one thing is certain : the majority of cultivated men 
and women do not set any exaggerated value upon 
these subtle and singular odours and flavours in 
literary art which your professional critic is so sedu- 
lously in search of. Your professional critic is 
often like a medical specialist, who is more keenly 
interested in a remarkable and abnormal case than 
in the wider aspects of pathology or therapeutics. 
The typical intelligent reader does not share this 
purely professional curiosity; he is not so tired of 
the great writers of the past as to resent any natural 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 27 

and inherited resemblance to them in their suc- 
cessors. Rather is he pleased to see the ancient 
ancestral lineaments reappear, and to think that the 
noble tradition in which he was nurtured is being 
nobly perpetuated. 

Indeed I am more and more convinced that there 
exists a large though scattered body of cultivated, 
intelligent, serious, but silent lovers of fine litera- 
ture, who are quite unswayed by ephemeral literary 
fashions, and quite indifferent to the critical catch- 
words which are so often made to do duty in place 
of the unchanging laws of taste and form. These 
unknown and silent lovers of fine literature are 
probably the real readers, and the real judges, by 
whose judgment in the long run the poet stands or 
falls. They are superior to the mere virtuosity of 
the professional connoisseur, for they are not blase 
as he is, but have kept alive their original faculty 
6f enjoying those writers who tread the great main 
road of the mind; who belong to the centre party 
of literature ; who do not loiter long in the by-paths 
or fix their abode in some blind alley of thought or 
style. This informal judiciary is our nearest living 
approach to that ultimate court of literary appeal 
which we call posterity; and I venture to prophesy 
that before our century is twenty years older these 



28 THE POET'S PLACE 

serious lovers of serious literature, for whom the 
poet has still his very real place in the scheme of 
life, will have largely augmented their numbers. 

Nor would it surprise me if such an increase of 
their forces should coincide with some falling off 
in the relative numerical strength of the readers of 
prose fiction. The position of prose fiction is at 
present apparently so impregnable, its conquest of 
the public seems so complete, that most of us can 
hardly bring ourselves to conceive the possibility of 
the fall of the novel from its high estate. And yet 
the novel, as. we nowadays understand it, is a form 
of literature so modern — I suppose it dates virtually 
from the author of Clarissa Harlow e — ^that it must 
surely have been called into existence by some phase 
of taste which is itself also modern, and which, born 
of an age, may pass with an age. For it is only in 
the hands of its very greatest masters that the novel 
can truly be called a form of art. In lesser hands 
it is not so much an art as a game — the game of 
keeping up the ball of the narrative, of holding the 
reader's attention by alternately gratifying and 
piquing his curiosity, of resorting to innumerable 
shifts and transparent devices which are scarcely the 
methods of an art, in the great sense of that word. 
The endless conversations, usually unmemorable in 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 29 

themselves; the so-called realism; the often indis- 
criminate transcription of life, as if everything in 
life had an equal value; all this has about it some- 
thing which scarcely seems to smack of permanency. 
Art is above all eclectic. It selects, it does not 
merely throw " life " at you in handfuls. It fixes 
its eye upon large essential features of things, it re- 
fuses to have its attention frittered away upon a 
thousand accidental details. Think of the great 
human stories in the Bible; masterpieces of narra- 
tion; stories told with the consummate perfection 
of narrative art, with epic breadth and with what I 
will venture to call epic brevity; no long-spun dia- 
logue between the titanic actors in the drama; no 
chronicle of the expression of their faces or the tone 
of their voices, nothing but the huge elemental facts 
and events put before you with a huge elemental 
simplicity. Take the story of Judith and Holo- 
fernes in the Apocrypha. There you have a story 
on the grandest lines, superb in the sweep of its 
action, and told in about as many words as would 
suffice to fill a dozen pages of a modern novel. 
That is the kind of narrative art which reaches and 
stirs us after thousands of years; not the kind of 
narrative art which preserves a faithful record of 
how the hero of the story coughed slightly at a 



30 THE POET'S PLACE 

moment of supreme crisis in his fate, or how 
the heroine at a similar juncture wore a sprig 
of primroses in a dress of some fluffy white 
material. 

In short it is my opinion — an opinion, I am 
aware, which is shared by few persons at present, 
and probably by no novelist — that the novel, as 
nowadays understood, will pass away, or at all 
events will cease to dominate the situation — to upset 
the balance of power, as it now does, among the 
republics and principalities of literature. Fiction is 
really the arch-enemy of literature at the present 
time. The very word '' literature " seems in most 
people's mouths to mean scarcely anything but 
novels and tales. Now we have had amongst us in 
England during the past quarter of a century some 
gifted novelists, but we have also had some very 
real poets — poets whose names and achievement 
would, in my opinion, add lustre to any age or na- 
tion. They occupy almost no place in the public 
eye; they receive almost no substantial rewards; 
and they are everlastingly being told what feeble 
and degenerate successors they are to the poets who, 
being dead, are commonly called the Victorian 
Giants. Your novelist, as a rule, gets his due re- 
wards in this life. Your poet, as a rule, does not. 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 3I 

Now it is no part of my purpose to attempt any 
estimate of the work of my poetical contemporaries 
in England. All that I shall do is to offer them my 
most sincere condolences on the hard fate which 
condemned them to be born there at all in the latter 
part of the nineteenth century. If you wish your 
poets to blossom and fructify as Nature may have 
intended, you must give them some warmth and 
sunshine. If they grow up in an Arctic environ- 
ment of perpetual frost, a killing frost, do not ex- 
pect from them the abounding harvest which only 
a summer sun can fully ripen. Their appropriate 
place in the scheme of life is not in life's cold outer 
courts and shivering ante-chambers. Surely it is to 
the great banquet ing-hall itself that the minstrel 
should be bidden. 

The true function of the poet to-day is to keep 
fresh within us our often flagging sense of life's 
greatness and grandeur. Like that Helen to whom 
Edgar Poe addressed in early youth some of his 
most exquisite verses, — her whose classic beauty 
" brought him home " " to the glory that was Greece 
and the grandeur that was Rome " — like her, the 
poet recalls us, " brings us home " to a glory we 
are but too prone to lose sight of, to a grandeur we 
continually forget. But woe be unto him if he him- 



22 THE POET'S PLACE 

self forgets that the ancient and only way in which 
he can truly perform this function is by marrying 
his wisdom to a worthy music. We have had poets 
among us who forgot this lesson, and their inevi- 
table nemesis is to be themselves forgotten. Neither 
his intellectual brilliancy and subtlety nor his prod- 
igal wealth of fancy has saved Donne from the fate 
which overtakes all poets who lack the crowning 
grace of harmonious utterance. There are singers 
to-day who seem to cultivate a gratuitous rugged- 
ness, forgetting that what may be effective as an 
exception becomes merely tedious when it consti- 
tutes the rule. I myself should imagine that if one 
of these gentlemen happened in a moment of absent- 
mindedness to write a perfectly regular and smooth- 
running line, he would spend, if necessary, days and 
nights in tormenting and lacerating it out of all 
shape and comeliness. When I find myself suffer- 
ing from the effects of what some persons consider 
ruggedly powerful diction, my remedy is to call to 
mind and inwardly repeat some passage from one 
of the great poets, where language and metre are 
employed with imperial mastery, and yet with a 
perfect obedience to law — nay, in a spirit that re- 
joices in law and embraces discipline with ardour. 
Fortunately English poetry is rich in such passages, 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 33 

for in our blank verse we possess a measure which 
without any violent distortion of the normal line 
can be almost infinitely varied in structure and 
cadence and modulation by the architectonic power 
of real metrical genius. Our greatest poets ex- 
emplify this abundantly — but then theirs is a 
kind of poetry which disdains all oddity, all 
quaintness, all violence; a kind of poetry in 
which power is wedded to grace, in perfect nup- 
tial bliss. 

Ladies and gentlemen, the foregoing observations 
were jotted down during my rather uneven progress 
towards you across the Atlantic in the teeth of ad- 
verse winds which seemed to typify somewhat the 
fate of the modern bard. Since my arrival on these 
shores I have been told that here also the public 
interest in poetry is visibly on the wane. I have 
even been warned that I could scarcely choose a 
more unpopular subject on which to discourse than 
that calling of which I myself am a humble practi- 
tioner. If that be so, then the adverse winds to 
which I allude indicate a meteorological condition 
affecting a wider geographical area than I had sup- 
posed. Now here in America, you are at any rate 
to be congratulated upon your comparative freedom 



34 THE POET'S PLACE 

from the particular kind of social influences which 
in the mother country are apt to affect unduly — ^to 
affect illegitimately — the mental tone of large 
masses of human beings. In England it is possible 
for a frivolous aristocracy, an idealess plutocracy, 
or a somewhat unintellectual court, in a considerable 
measure, to set the tone of the entire community. 
King Edward VII was a man with fine human 
qualities which we must all admire, but he was not 
furiously addicted to literature, and to extol him as 
a patron of literature would be the insincerest flat- 
tery. Perhaps you will say that patronage, with its 
tendency to impair the independence of the patron- 
ized, is the last thing to be desired in the real in- 
terests of Letters ; and in theory this is true, but in 
practice it is perhaps disputable. Similarly one may 
admit that titles and honorific distinctions are poor 
things in themselves, while recognizing that in a 
country like England they still retain some of the 
symbolic value of insignia, and may occasionally 
serve the useful purpose of investing certain 
achievements which are more real than spectacular 
with a dignity visible to the general eye. In Eng- 
land, not state action only, but the personality of 
the heads of the state and of the occupants of 
august positions can affect profoundly the whole 



IN THE SCHEME OF LIFE 35 

mental atmosphere. King George and Queen Mary 
are setting an admirable example to their people 
in all things ethical; if they can set an equally ad- 
mirable example in the direction of things intellec- 
tual, their record will be a truly illustrious one. 
But, as I was saying, you in America are to be 
felicitated on the fact that you are not at the mercy 
of those chance currents, those fortuitous influ- 
ences, which are capable of playing so large a part 
in the life of my countrymen. If ever there was a 
nation that seemed to hold its destinies in its own 
hands and to be master of its own soul, that nation 
is the United States of America. If you let the 
intellectual life of your country decline, you cannot 
lay the blame on a king or an aristocracy. As you 
look back on the history of your country, does it 
not seem to you that America would have been 
distinctly a poorer place in the human sense if it 
had not been for her poets? It seems to me that 
the air of America is the sweeter because Long- 
fellow breathed it. It is a vivid and a vitalizing air ; 
a tonic air; an air that vibrates with powerful im- 
pulses. It feels to me like an air which a poet might 
be glad to have been born in; an air which a poet 
might be glad to sing in. But do not ask him to 
sing in a solitude. Do not ask him to sing before 



36 THE POET'S PLACE 

an audience which visibly melts away while he 
sings. Give him something of your hearts, and he 
will give you all his own heart in return. Give him 
a place — an honourable and honoured place — in 
your scheme of life. 



THE MUSE IN EXILE 



THE MUSE IN EXILE 

Verse — a light handful — verse again I bring; 

Verse that perhaps had glowed with lustier hues 

Amid more fostering air : for it was born 

In the penurious sunshine of an Age 

That does not stone her prophets, but, alas, 

Turns, to their next of kin, the singers, oft 

An ear of stone: in bare, bleak truth an Age 

That banishes the poets, as he of old. 

The great child of the soul of Socrates, 

Out of his visionary commonwealth 

Banished them ; for she drives them coldly forth 

From where alone they yearn to live — her heart; 

Scourges them with the scourge of apathy, 

39 



40 THE MUSE IN EXILE 

From out her bosom's rich metropolis. 
To a distant, desert province of her thoughts, 
A region grey and pale: or, crueller still. 
Gives them, at times, gusts of applause, and then 
Remands them to new frosts of unconcern; 
Nay, to atone for some brief generous hour, 
Holds back their dues, husbands the heartening 

w^ord. 
Until they dwell where praise cheers not the praised, 
And scorn and honour are received in like 
Silence, and laurel and poppy are as one. 
Let me not slight her. Let me not do wrong 
To her whose child I am : this giant Age, 
Cumbered with her own hugeness as is the wont 
Of giants. Yet too openly she herself 
Hath slighted one of Time's great offspring: she 
Hath slighted Song ; and Song will be revenged : 



THE MUSE IN EXILE 41 

Song will survive her ; Song will follow her hearse, 
And either weep or dance upon her grave. 
For in Life's midmost chamber there still burns 
Upon the ancient hearth the ancient fire. 
Whence are all flamelike things, the unquenchable 

Muse 
Among them, who, though meanly lodged to-day, 
In dreariest outlands of the world's regard, 
Foresees the hour when Man shall once more feel 
His need of her, and call the exile home. 



DAWN ON THE HEADLAND 

Dawn — and a magical stillness: on earth, quies- 
cence profound ; 
On the waters a vast Content, as of hunger ap- 
peased and stayed; 
In the heavens a silence that seems not mere priva- 
tion of sound, 
But a thing with form and body, a thing to be 
touched and weighed! 

Yet I know that I dwell in the midst of the roar of 

the cosmic wheel, 

In the hot collision of Forces, and clangour of 

boundless Strife, 

42 



DAWN ON THE HEADLAND 43 

Mid the sound of the speed of the worlds, the rush- 
ing worlds, and the peal 
Of the thunder of Life. 



TO A PRIVILEGED THIEF 

Blackbird, that in our garden, here and there 

Nibbling an apple or pear, 

Hast marred so many and slaked thyself on none- 

If thou wouldst come and eat thy fill of one 

Instead of ruining twenty. 

Were it not kindlier done? 

Thou still wouldst have thy share 

Of this our plenty, 

This ruddy issue of the earth and sun. 

But ah, thou dost for thine exemplar take 

The loveless rake, 

The shallow libertine, 

44 



TO A PRIVILEGED THIEF 45 

Who wanders among maidens, leaving each 
Like a peck'd apple or a bitten peach, 
For other palates spoiled ; nor dares to win 
One heart in rich completeness, 
And banquet all his days on its upyielded sweetness. 



THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 



Lines read by the author at the Dickens Centenary celebration 
at the Carnegie Hall, New York. 



When Nature first designed, 

In her all-procreant mind, 

The man whom here to-night we are met to 

honour — 
When first the idea of Dickens flashed upon her — 
" Where, where," she said, " in all my populous 

Earth, 

Shall this prodigious child be brought to birth? 

Where shall he have his earliest wondering look 

Into my magic book? 

Shall he be born where life runs like a brook, 

Far from the sound and shock of mighty deeds. 

Among soft English meads? 

46 



THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 47 

Or shall he first my pictured volume scan 
Where London lifts its hot and fevered brow. 
For cooling Night to fan? 
Nay, nay/' she said; " I have a happier plan! 
For where, at Portsmouth, on the embattled tides. 
The ships of war step out with thundering prow. 
And shake their stormy sides — 
In yonder place of arms, whose gaunt sea wall 
Flings to the clouds the far-heard bugle-call, 
He shall be born amid the drums and guns, 
He shall be born among my fighting sons, 
Perhaps the greatest warrior of them all." 

So there, where frown the forts and battle-gear. 
And all the proud sea babbles Nelson's name, 
Into the world this later hero came. 
He, too, a man that knew all moods but fear. 



48 THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 

He, too, a fighter! Yet not his the strife 
That leaves dark scars on the fair face of life. 
He did not fight to rend the world apart, 
He fought to make it one in mind and heart, 
Building a broad and noble bridge to span 
The icy chasm that sunders man from man. 
Wherever Wrong had fixed its bastions deep, 
There did his fierce yet gay assault surprise 
Some fortress girt with lucre or with lies; 
There his light battery stormed some ponderous 

keep; 
There charged he up the steep; 
A knight on whom no palsying torpor fell, 
Keen to the last to break a lance with Hell. 
And still undimmed his conquering weapons shine; 
On his bright sword no spot of rust appears; 
And still, across the years. 



THE CENTENARY OF DICKENS 49 

His soul goes foth to battle, and in the face 
Of whatsoe'er is false, or cruel, or base, 
He hurls his gage, and leaps among the spears. 
Being armed with pity and love, and scorn divine, 
Immortal laughter, and immortal tears. 



THE THREE GIVERS 

England gave me sun and storm, 
The food on which my spirit throve; 

America gave me hand-grasps warm, 
And Ireland gave me her I love. 

Heirs of unequal wealth they are, 

These noble lands, these givers three; 

And it was the poorest one by far, 
That gave the richest gift to me. 



50 



IMPERIAL MOTHER 

Imperial Mother, from whose breasts 
We drank as babes the pride whereby 

We question ev'n thine own behests, 
And judge thee with no timorous eye;-— 

Oft slow to hear when thou dost call, 
Oft vext with an unstable will, 

When once a rival seeks thy fall 

We are thy sons and daughters still! 

The love that halts, the faith that veers, 

Are then deep sunk as in the Sea : 

The Sea where thou must brook no peers, 

And halve with none thy sovereignty. 

SI 



HOME TRUTHS 

It is not the flight from the country, 
It is not the rush to the town, 

It is ignorance, ignorance, ignorance, 
Will bring old England down. 

Though vast our overlordship, 

And ancient our renown, 
If the unfed mind is everywhere 

*Twill pull old England down. 

Do German legions menace? 

Do German Dreadnoughts frown? 
It is rather the German schoolmaster 

May smite old England down. 



LIBERALISM 

To Liberalism I owe, and pay, 
Allegiance whole and hearty, — 

The Liberalism which has to-day 
No foe like the Liberal Party. 



53 



ON PYRRHO, A GREAT EDITOR 

Yes, Pyrrho was my hospitable friend, 
Till, at the nineteenth century^s stormy end, 
Upon one thunderous theme, we failed to agree. 
Thenceforward, "Oh, the difference to me!" 
Thenceforward, if I pined, I pined in vain 
For Pyrrho's conversation or champagne. 

And whose opinion, Pyrrho's or my own, 
Was wisest? Time may tell, and Time alone. 
I do but know that mine has cost me dear, 
While his brought in ten thousand pounds a year. 



S4 



A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 

When Man was yet so young upon the Earth 

As to be just as lofty or as lowly 

As other creatures, whether hoofed or taloned, 

Feathered or scaled, that shared with him this orb; 

It chanced upon a day that he peered down 

From his hid perch, high in some forest tree, 

And saw beneath him on the ground a beast 

Of alien kind, his foe. Then did he spring, 

With something 'twixt a chatter and a screech — 

Knowing not other language — toward his victim; 

And as from branch to branch he swung himself, 
With long, thick, hirsute arms, down to the ground, 

55 



S6 A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 

It SO befell that the last branch of all 

Broke off in his right hand. 'Twas his first weapon ! 

The father of all weapons wielded since! 

Nay, more — from this, all instruments and tools, 

Whether they be of war or peace, descend. 

Thus, in that pregnant hour, that held within it 

All after ages — thus, and then, and there, 

Took he the first tremendous step of fate 

In the long task of making earth, stone, iron 

His servants. Thus his great career began. 



Such is my guess — which whoso will may scorn, 
And whoso will may ponder — as to how 
Dawned through the darkness this our human 

empire 
Over the beast and bird, this human sway 
Of the earth and air, this governance and power 



A GUESS IN ANTHROPOLOGY 57 

Whereby we bind to our hot chariot wheels 
The captive world, and shall not pause content 
Until all nature bear the yoke of man, 
As man himself beareth the yoke of God. 

June 4, 1912. 



A LITERARY DIALOGUE 
[The speakers, X. X. and W. W.] 

X. X. 

A POET always in a fuss; 

A bustling poet, who thought to utter 

All Life's meaning in a stutter. 

And whose poetry is thus 

One interminable splutter; — 

An intellectual acrobat, 

Skilled in a sort of strenuous clowning — 

W. W. 

God bless us, why, you don't mean Browning? 

58 



A LITERARY DIALOGUE 59 

X. X. 



He made us stand agape, but we 
Were wearied in the end by that 
Intolerable agility, 
As of some vast, performing flea- 



W. W. 
Come, come, this is too much for me. 



X. X. 

As to his " optimism," it's just 
The doctrine of the well-dined man 
Who, o'er his port, takes God on trust, 
Lauds, with sound lungs, the Cosmic Plan, 
And finds all perfect beyond question, 



6o A LITERARY DIALOGUE 

Evil itself being good when seen 
Through a supremely good digestion. 



W. W. 
But if it*s Browning that you mean- 



X. X. 

Great poets bring their fruits full-grown; 

Only the fine results are shown 

Of their great thinking: he displays 

Each crude process to your gaze, 

Or gives you processes alone ; 

As if a builder's hand should raise 

No tower, no stately, gracious thing, 

Looking out on time and tide. 



A LITERARY DIALOGUE 6i 

But a wilderness of scaffolding, 
And 

W. W. 
Well, go on. 

X. X. 

And nought beside ! 



SUMMER'S OVERTHROW 

Summer is fallen, is conquered, her greatness rav- 
ished away. 

We saw her broken with tempest on cliffs of the 
Irish shore; 

We saw her flee like the wraith of a monstrous rose 
before 

The airy invisible hunters that hunted her night 
and day. 

And once we believed them frustrate, believed them 
reft of their prey, 

For she suddenly flashed anew into violent splen- 
dour, defied 

The yelling pack of the storm, and turned, and held 

them at bay. 

62 



SUMMER'S OVERTHROW 63 

In superb despair she faced them, she towered Hke 

June once more, — 
Then, sinking, shook on the world her golden ruins, 

and died. 



DUBLIN BAY 

On Dublin Bay, on Dublin Bay, 

The ships come in, the ships go out, 
The great gulls hover and wheel about, 

The white sails gleam, and shimmer away ; 

And over the heathery heights we stray, 

To watch, through a haze of sultry drought, 
The ships come in, the ships go out, 

Yonder below us on Dublin Bay. 

We have heard the clang of Life's mean fray, 

Where joyless sounded the victors' shout. 

And brief as the flash of a leaping trout 

Was Pride that pranced in the summer ray; 

64 



DUBLIN BAY 65 

And little we think of the world to-day, 
Whether it smile or whether it pout. 
For the ships come in, and the ships go out, 
And yonder below is Dublin Bay. 

Grief may visit us, — who shall say? 

Time may spite us, and Fortune flout; 

Care, with her brood, a doleful rout. 
Care may follow us all the way ; 
But Love is ours, and Love will stay. 

Love that knows not shadow of doubt. 

While the ships come in, while the ships go out, 
Yonder below us on Dublin Bay. 



HYMN FOR A PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE 

Great and fair is she, our Land, 
High of heart and strong of hand; 
Dawn is on her forehead still, 
In her veins youth's arrowy thrill. 

Hers are riches, might and fame; 
All the earth resounds her name; 
In her roadsteads navies ride: 
Hath she need of aught beside? 

Power Unseen, before whose eyes 

Nations fall and nations rise. 

Grant she climb not to her goal 

All- forgetful of the Soul! 
66 



HYMN FOR A PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE 67 
Firm in honour be she found, 
Justice-armed and mercy-crowned, 
Blest in labour, blest in ease, 
Blest in noiseless charities. 

Unenslaved by things that must 
Yield full soon to moth and rust. 
Let her hold a light on high 
Men unborn may travel by. 

Mightier still she then shall stand. 
Moulded by Thy secret hand, 
Power Eternal, at whose call 
Nations rise and nations fall! 



IRELAND ONCE MORE 

Wild Erin of the still unconquered heart; 

Thou whom the woeful interloping seas 

Have blindly riven apart 

From her that nursed me on great craggy knees, 

Her of whose dales and mountains I am sprung: 

Once more I stray among 

Fields that remember thy calamities, 

And hills that muse on ancient weeping years ; 

And I behold how beautiful thou art 

In thine immortal tears. 

Yes, thou art fair, and Sorrow on thy brow 

Hath deeper charm than all the brood of Joy; 

68 



IRELAND ONCE MORE 69 

But sad have been thy harpstrings long enow, 
And ev'n the loveliness of grief can cloy. 
Oh, come thou forth and put the Past away, 
Oh, bid it get behind thee and begone. 
And with thy conquered conqueror speed thou on 
Unto the mightier day. 
This is no time for sundering and divorce, 
This is the hour for closer bonds of soul. 
In one great march, by one far-mounting course, 
To one majestic goal. 

Old Hate is dying : let Ignorance, mother of Hate, 
Follow her leperous daughter through HelFs gate; 
And when from both at last the breath is fled. 
Then for their carrion corses let there be 
A sea-deep grave, to hide them till the sea 
Gives up its dead. 



ON KILLINEY STRAND 

The sea before me 

Is harassed and stormy: 

The low sky o'er me 

Is haggard and wan. 
With grey tides foaming, 
And drear winds roaming, 
And tired gulls homing 

Great Night comes on. 



70 



PART OF MY STORY 

We met when you were in the May of life, 
And I had left its June behind me far. 

Some barren victories, — much defeat and strife, — 
Had marked my soul with many a hidden scar. 

I was a man hurt deep with blows that men 

Ne'er guessed at ; strangely weak — more strangely 
strong ; 

Daring at times ; and uttering now and then, 
Out of a turbid heart, a limpid song. 

Fitful in effort, — fixed and clear in aim; 

Poor, but not envious of the wealth I lack; 

Ever half -scaling the hard hill of fame, 

And ever by some evil fate flung back, — 

71 



^2 PART OF MY STORY 

Such did you find me, in that city grey 

Where we were plighted, O my comrade true 
My wife, now dearer far than on the day 

When this our love was new. 



THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 

In lands that still the heirs of Othman sway, 

There lives a legend, wild as wildest note 

Of birds that haunt the Arabian waste, where rolls 

Tigris through Baghdad to the Persian Sea. 

'Tis fabled that the mighty sorcerer, 

King Solomon, when he died, was sitting aloft, 

Like one that mused, on his great lion-throne ; 

Sitting with head bent forward o'er his staff. 

Whereon with both his hands he leaned. And 

tribes 
And peoples moved before him, in their awe 
Not venturing nigh ; and tawny fiercenesses, 
Panther and pard, at timorous distance couched ; 



74 THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 

While Figures vast, Forms indeterminate. 

Demons and Genii, the Enchanter's thralls, 

Cloudily rose, and darkly went and came. 

But so majestic sat he lifeless there, 

And counterfeited life so perfectly, 

That change of hue or feature was by none 

Seen, and none guessed him dead, and every knee 

Rendered him wonted homage, until worms, 

Gnawing his staff, made fall that last support. 

And with it fell the unpropped Death, divulged 

In gorgeous raiment to the wondering world. 



So may an Empire, from whose body and limbs 
The spirit hath wholly fled, still seem to breathe 
And feel, still keep its living posture, still 
Cheat with similitude of glory and power 
The gazing Earth, until the evil things 



THE SAPPERS AND MINERS 75 

That burrow in secret, and by night destroy, 
Unseat the grandiose Semblance, and man's heart 
Hastes to forget the obeisances he made 
To a jewelled corse, long ripe for sepulture. 



A FULL CONFESSION 

What lands, where you and I have dwelt or 

strayed, 

What lands, you ask me, Dearest, love I best, 

After this Isle, with which my roots are woven 

Beyond unravelling? First, your motherland, 

Your Erin, dear to me for her sweet self, 

Dearer for one sweet daughter whom she bore: 

A land of glowing, kindling countenances, 

A land where, when the lips are oped in speech. 

All the lit face speaks too : and, next to her, 

America, the Supreme Misunderstood, 

The oft aspersed, oft railed at and reviled 

And slandered ; in whose cities, in whose streets 

And avenues, we almost thought to find, 

76 



A FULL CONFESSION 77 

Adored and supplicated day and night, 
A graven image throned against the heavens, 
A sculptor's marble dream of Mammon, there 
Hymned with Te Deum by ten million throats, 
But found instead the nourished brain, athirst 
For nobler things than lucre ; found the love 
Of these fair things sown wide in fecund soil: 
And found the way not steep, but easy and smooth, 
To that best hostel for all travellers, 
The Human Heart Divine. How can we think 
Coldly of such a land, itself so warm 
In its accost and greeting? There we won 
Friends whom to lose were to find life itself 
Less winsome. There, too, did we taste awhile 
Sorrow, not pleasure alone. And there we roamed 
Wide as from Spain-remembering shores, that 
watch 



78 A FULL CONFESSION 

The hues and moods of a chameleon sea 
Beyond Miami's palms and orange-groves, 
To where Niagara takes the infernal plunge, 
And out of the grey rage of the abysm, 
Out of the torment, everlastingly 
Upbreathes what seems, when sunlight touches it. 
The smoke of Hell, lost in the smile of God. 



A LITTLE DITTY 

Oh, England is a darling, 
And Scotland is a dear, 

And well I love their faces 
At any time of year; 

But on a summer day 

My heart went astray. 

And I gave it all away 

To bonny Ireland. 

Oh, hardy is the thistle, 

And comely is the rose, 

But witching are the maids where 

The shy shamrock grows; 
79 



8o A LITTLE DITTY 

And I knew, upon the day 
When I gave my heart away, 
It would ever after stay 
In bonny Ireland. 



THE INDESTRUCTIBLES 

The dullards of past generations, the undiscerning 
crew 
That turned deaf ears unto Shelley, that turned 
blind eyes upon Keats, 
Unchangeably reincarnate, invincibly born anew, 
Still buzz in the press and the salon, still lord it 
in learning's seats. 

Do you think they are ever conquered? Do you 

think they are ever slain? 

They are secular, sempiternal; the Powers that 

cannot die. 

When all things else have perished, Stupidity shall 

remain, 

And sit secure on the ruins of every star of the 

sky. 

8i 



PEACE 

Lines in anticipation of the centenary of the conclusion of 
peace between England and the United States. 

Behold a marvel great! 

Two mighty peoples, in two hemispheres, 

Throughout a hundred years, 

Slaying not one another in murderous hate! 

This is the miracle we shall celebrate 

With pomps, and feasts, and state. 

O Nations, count not peace itself an end. 

But something which, achieved, we must transcend. 

Be glad of war's surcease, 

But give no rest unto the soul of Man 

Till he has fared some stages further than 

Mere Peace. 

82 



A RETORT 

Year after year it grows more hard 

For the Muse to capture the world's regard, 

And the world asks lightly, What ails the bard? 

But it never asks if some deep ill 

Be making its Soul more hard to thrill — 

Some malady there^ past leech's skill. 



83 



CLONTARF 

Here, nigh a thousand years ago, 

King Brian fought the Dane, 
On a day of ruin and overthrow. 

And at eve in his tent was slain. 

And here, where thrones came crashing down 

On the wild, ensanguined shore, 
In a drooping suburb of Dublin town 

To-day the tramcars roar. 

And they jolt me back with a ruthless whirl, 

From ages of myth and mist. 

To an Ireland ruled by a harmless earl 

And an innocent essayist. 

84 



"IRELAND'S EYE" 

A DREAR, waste, island rock, by tempests worn, 

Gnawed by the seas and naked to the sky. 
It bears the name it hath for ages borne 
Of "Ireland's Eye." 

It looks far eastward o'er the desert foam; 

Round it the whimpering, wild sea-voices cry. 
The gulls and cormorants have their stormy home 
On Ireland's Eye. 

A strange and spectral head the gaunt crag rears, 

And ghostly seem the wings that hover nigh. 

Are these dim rains the phantoms of old tears 

In Ireland's Eye? 
85 



86 "IRELAND'S EYE" 

The tide ebbs fast ; the wind droops low to-day, 

Feeble as dying hate that hates to die. 
Blow, living airs, and blow the mists away 
From Ireland's Eye. 



MOONSET AND SUNRISE 

The forts of midnight fall at last; 

The ancient, baleful powers 
Yield up, with countenances aghast, 

Their dragon-guarded towers. 
Henceforth, their might as dust being trod, 
'Tis easier to believe in God. 

Where were the great ones of the earth, 

Kaiser and Czar and King? 
Small thanks to them, for this glad birth 

Whereat the daystars sing ! 

The little lands, with hearts of flame. 

Have put the mighty thrones to shame. 

87 



88 MOONSET AND SUNRISE 

To-morrow, who shall dare deny 

The heroes their reward, 
And snatch from under Victory's eye 

The harvest of the sword? 
Not we ourselves, a second time, 
Could dye our hands with such a crime. 



Idle the dream, that e'er the Turk 

Can change into a Man! 
Have we not seen his handiwork 

Since first his reign began, — 
Since first he fed his lust and rage 
On ravished youth and slaughtered age? 



If, of his power, no lingering trace 
Remained to insult the sky, 



MOONSET AND SUNRISE 89 

Were not this earth a better place 

Wherein to live and die ? 
If he could vanish from the Day, 
What but a stain were cleansed away? 



Three lustrums have in turmoil sped 
Since Greece, unfriended, hurled 

Her javelin at the python's head, 
Before a languid world, 

While the great Kings, in far-off tones. 

Mumbled upon their frozen thrones. 



She dared too much, or dared too soon. 

And broke in disarray. 
Where, underneath his crescent moon. 

The coiled Corruption lay. 



90 MOONSET AND SUNRISE 

Heartened anew, the scaly thing 
Returned unto his ravening. 



But now his empire, more and more 
In narrowing confines penned. 

An old and putrefying sore, 
Hath festered to its end; 

Nor far the hour, when he at last 

Shall, like a foul disease, have passed. 



Pity for others had he none; 

In storms of blood and fire 
He slew the daughter with the son, 

The mother with the sire; 
And oft, where Earth had felt his tread, 
The quick were envious of the dead. 



MOONSET AND SUNRISE 91 

But since his fierceness and his strength. 

His faded pomps august, 
His courage and his guile, at length 

Sink into night and dust, 
For him, too, let Compassion plead, 
Ev'n as for all of Adam's seed. 



O lands by his dominion curst 

Throughout five hundred years, — 

You that could ne'er appease his thirst 
With all your blood and tears,^ 

In this new day that breaks divine 

He shall drink deep another wine. 



The cup of lowliness shall slake 
Lips that nought else might cool, 



92 MOONSET AND SUNRISE 

When hurricanes of terror shake 

kThe towers of Istamboul, 
And blasts blown on that Golden Horn 
Arouse the City of Dreadful Morn. 



For now the hour of dreams is past; 

The gibbering ghosts depart ; 
And Man is unashamed at last 

To have a human heart. 
And lo, the doors of dawn ajar. 
And in the East again a Star! 



Loveless and cold was Europe's sin. 
Loveless the path she chose, 

And self-upbraidings deep within 
She strangled as they rose; 



MOONSET AND SUNRISE 93 

But that dark trespass of our own 
Forbids that we should cast a stone. 

Enough, if hands that heretofore 

Laboured to bar His road, 
Delay henceforward nevermore 

The charioteers of God, 
Who halt and slumber, but anon, 
With burning wheels, drive thundering on. 

November 9, 1912. 



SCIENCE AND NATURE 

You babble of your " conquest of the air "; 
Of Nature's secrets one by one laid bare. 
Her secrets! They are evermore withheld: 
'Tis only in her porches you have dwelled. 
Could you once lift her veil as you desire, 
You were burnt up as chaff before her fire. 

When will you learn your place and rank in Mind? 

Art can create ; Science can only find. 

You do but nibble at Truth: your vaunted lore 

Is the half-scornful alms flung from her door. 

Your lips her weak and watered wine have known ; 

The unthinned vintage is for gods alone. 

94 



A CHANCE MEETING 

I MET a poet, — ^peerless among those 

Who make their lives and songs one perfect pose. 

A wise man too ! For, take the pose away, 

What else were left 'twould pose the gods to say. 



95 



TO A CERTAIN MINISTRY 

Statesmen, arrayed in all the splendour 
Of your long record of surrender, — 
If one false god there yet may be 
To whom you have not bowed the knee, 
Oh, haste to yield him genuflexion! 
Fill up the cup of your abjection. 
In that brief hour ere hence ye fleet, 
Make your ingloriousness complete. 
Let it not just elude perfection. 



9^ 



THE RASH POET 

A POET wrote a little book, and rashly called it a 

play, 
And some were wroth with the little book, for they 

said, " It is not a play; 
A poem, a passable poem perhaps, but oh dear, not 

a play; 
Not anything like a play!" 

A lover gave his lady a pearl, and somehow called 

it a pebble. 
But she never quarrelled with the pearl because it 

was not 3, pebble; 
She never cried, " A passable pearl, but oh dear, 

not a. pebble ; 

Not anything like a pebble ! " 

97 



ARTHUR AT TINTAGIL: A ROMAUNT 

Sir Launcelot he was lithe and agile, 
His armour fitted him wondrous well ; 

And he spake with Arthur at Tintagil, — 
The place beside the new hotel. 

" Thy knights," he said, " are stout and able ; 

I trow their swords are trusty steel ; 
But what they like at thy Round Table 

Is a square meal." 

And Queen Guinevere was fair and fragile, 

And loved Sir Launcelot all too well; 

And she tired of Arthur and Tintagil, 

Long ere they built the new hotel. 

98 



ARTHUR AT TINTAGIL : A ROMAUNT 99 
Fled are the shapes of rose-hued fiction: 

Vanished are Vivien, Elaine, Etarre! 
Gone to a world of archaic diction. 

Where only impossible beings are. 

Fled is the Queen, the fair and fragile, 
Flown with the Knight she loved too well; 

But the sea still roars beneath Tintagil 
And that hotel. 



ULSTER'S REWARD 

What is the wage the faithful earn? 
What is a recompense fair and meet ? 
Trample their fealty under your feet; 
That is a fitting and just return. 
Flout them, buffet them, over them ride. 
Fling them aside. 

Ulster is ours to mock and spurn, 
Ours to spit upon, ours to deride; 
And let it be known and blazoned wide 
That this is the wage the faithful earn. 
Did she uphold us when others defied ? 
Then fling her aside. 

100 



ULSTER'S REWARD lOI 

Oh, when has constancy firm and deep 
Been proven so oft yet held so cheap? 
She had only asked that none should sever, 
None should divorce us, nothing divide ; 
She had only asked to be ours for ever, 
And this was denied. 

This was the prayer of the heart of Ulster, 
To them that repulsed her 
And flung her aside. 



When in the world was such payment tendered 

For service rendered? 

Her faith had been tested, her love had been tried. 

And all that she begged was with us to abide. 

She proffered devotion in boundless store. 

But that is a thing men prize no more, 

And tossing it back in her face they cried— 



102 ULSTER'S REWARD 

"Let us open the door, 
And fling her outside." 

Where on the earth was the like of it done 

In the gaze of the sun 

She had pleaded and prayed to be counted still 

As one of our household through good and ill, 

And with scorn they replied; 

Jeered at her loyalty, trode on her pride; 

Spurned her, repulsed her, — ^ 

Great-hearted Ulster; 

Flung her aside. 



SONNETS 



TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

I HEAR a mighty people asking now 

Who next shall be their captain and their chief. 

Amidst them towers a Man as Teneriffe 
Towers from the ocean, and that Man art thou — 

Thou of the shaggy and the craggy brow. 

The day of fate comes on; the time is brief; 

Round the great ship is many a lurking reef; 

And wouldst thou drive once more that giant prow ? 

Perhaps thou shalt and must! But if the choice 

Fall on another voyager, thou shalt still 

105 



io6 TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

Be what thou art, thy nation's living voice, 
Wherewith she speaks in thunder. Nay, thou art 

more; 
Thou art her fiery pulse, her conquering will ; 
Thou art America, dauntless Theodore. 

June i8, 1912. 



TILL THAT HOUR 

When captive Bonaparte behind him threw 

The chains of Elba, and flashed on earth once 

more 
In arms, against him marched a host that bore 
The Hly of France ; and baring to their view 
His bosom he cried, *'Shoot!" — but no man 

drew 
Trigger, and by a lone lake's wondering shore 
They knelt in awe and homage, to adore 
Him they were sent to smite and bind anew. 

Would that the hour, O England, were at hand, 

When thou, before the nations, without fear, 

107 



io8 TILL THAT HOUR 

Mightst in thy majesty unguarded stand, 
While none for very shame should dare assail 
Thy shieldless breast I But till that hour draw near, 
Thou mayst not once ungird thy cumbering mail. 



TO AN AMERICAN POET 

After reading his " Dirge on the Violation of the Panama 

Treaty."* 

Friend, who in these sad numbers dost deplore 
A faithless deed : because I love thy land, 
That gave to me of late so hearty a hand, 
In thronged Manhattan, or amid the roar 
Of that loud city on Michigan's still shore, 
Therefore do I rejoice that one pure band 

* It has been pointed out to me that the American nation, 
as distinct from its Government, is overwhelmingly against the 
policy here commented upon, and that the friend to whom this 
sonnet is addressed had himself emphasized the fact. I accept 
the correction gladly; but the Government of a democratic 
country is very apt to stand for the country in the eyes of the 
outside world, and if I have improperly confused the two I 
submit that the confusion is one into which the foreigner, in 
the particular circumstances of the case, may pardonably fall. 
To him, at the present time (January, 1913), the policy re- 
ferred to is a much more visible fact than the national repudi- 
ation of it.— W. W. 

109 



no TO AN AMERICAN POET 

Keep not ignoble silence, but withstand 

Ev'n Her, their mother, when she shuts the door 

In Honour's face. So Chatham, whose free speech 

Yet rings through Time — so Wordsworth, whose 

free song 
Comes blowing from his mountains — dared to 

impeach 
Their England, speaking out for Man. And long 
May Earth breed men like these, who scorned to 

teach 
That Power can shift the bounds of Right and 

Wrong. 



TO AN ENGLISH LIBERAL 

Who accused me of political apostasy. 

When reek of massacre filled the eastern skies, 

Who among singers sang for Man but me? 

These lute-strings were a scourge to tyranny 

When you turned listless from those anguished 

cries. 

A hundred times, when all the worldly-wise 

Kept comfortable silence, I spoke free. 

And would you now begrudge me liberty 

To use my own brain, see with my own eyes? 

When you hung rearward, I was in the van, 

Among the whizzing arrows ; and to-day, 

III 



112 TO AN ENGLISH LIBERAL 

Because in one thing I reshape my creed. 
You cry " Apostate ! " — Liberalism indeed ! 
Give me the Liberalism that guards for Man 
His right to think his thought and say his say. 



TO MISS CLARA B. SPENCE 
OF NEW YORK 

[A greeting from William Watson and Maureen, his wife.] 

Lady, whose task or joy it is to guide 

By fragrant pathways, toward noble goals 

Of womanhood, so many vernal souls, 

Clad in the glory of their morningtide; — 

Across that Sea, the Great Unsatisfied, 

That took the cruellest of its cruel tolls 

But yesterday, and now exulting rolls 

Above the fallen turrets of Man's pride, 

Receive our salutation, you that choose 

The life laborious, crowned with fruitful deed; 

113 



114 TO MISS CLARA B. SPENCE 

And us forgive, who oft so lightly heed 
What hours inestimable we richly lose, 
In this old garden and orchard, or some mead 
Lulled by the drone of the meandering Ouse. 



THE REAL REFORMER 

Not he, the statesman, whatsoe'er his name, 
Who would strip Life of all adventurousness. 
Of all but arrow-proof and storm-proof dress, 
Making it more and more ignobly tame. 
Poorer in perils which they that overcame 
Were braced and manned by, — making it less and 

less 
The school of heroes armed for struggle and 

stress, — 

Not he shall win hereafter radiant fame. 

But when some dauntless teller of truth unsweet 

Shall shake the slumberous People, with rude 

power, 

"5 



ii6 THE REAL REFORMER 

To a vast New Birth of all the soul and mind, 

Him, and none other, at the destined hour, 

Him, quick or dead, the thunderous thanks shall 

greet, 
Not of his country alone, but of his kind. 



RECENT POETRY 



SELECTED POEMS OF 

JOHN DAVIDSON 

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POEMS. By Stephen Phillips. Including "Marpessa" and 
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k?R 8 1913 



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